Publication Details
Detecting Routing Loops in the Data Plane
BEN BASAT, R.
Kuka Mário, Ing.
Antichi Gianni, Dr.
YU, M.
MITZENMACHER, M.
Network algorithms, monitoring, routing loop detection, Unroller
Routing loops can harm network operation. Existing loop detection mechanisms,
including mirroring packets, storing state on switches, or encoding the path onto
packets, impose significant overheads on either the switches or the network. We
present Unroller, a solution that enables real-time identification of routing
loops in the data plane with minimal overheads. Our algorithms encode a varying
fixed-size subset of the traversed path on each packet. That way, our overhead is
independent of the path length, while we can detect the loop once the packet
returns to some encoded switch. We implemented Unroller in P4 and compiled into
three different FPGA targets. We then compared it against state-of-the-art
solutions on real WAN and data center topologies and show that it requires from
6x to 100x fewer bits added to packets than existing methods.
@inproceedings{BUT162287,
author="KUČERA, J. and BEN BASAT, R. and KUKA, M. and ANTICHI, G. and YU, M. and MITZENMACHER, M.",
title="Detecting Routing Loops in the Data Plane",
booktitle="CoNEXT 2020 - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies",
year="2020",
pages="466--473",
publisher="Association for Computing Machinery",
address="New York, NY",
doi="10.1145/3386367.3431303",
isbn="978-1-4503-7948-9",
url="https://www.fit.vut.cz/research/publication/12105/"
}